Month: June 2015

Eddie Redmayne, best actor Oscar winner and former Chelsea and England international Frank Lampard have been recognised in the Queen’s 2015 Birthday Honours List. Lampard was awarded an OBE in recognition of his sterling football career at Chelsea where he netted 150 goals making him the club’s most prolific goalscorer from midfield. He described it as an extremely proud moment for him and his family. Redmayne was awarded an OBE for a career-defining role playing scientist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. He lives in Chelsea with his wife Hannah Bagshawe. Paddington Bear author Michael Bond, 89, was made a CBE for his most famous chronicles of the adventures of a Peruvian Bear which has been translated into many languages and was made into a film last year. The marmalade-loving and duffle coat wearing bear who became lost at west London’s Paddington train station has become one of London’s most recognised faces.

They are our closest cousins and it has now been proven they also share our propensity for a good bottle of red. Scientists who conducted the research study at Bossou in Guinea West Africa found wild chimpanzees had adapted their behaviour to consume palm wine, a local tipple fermented at the top of palm trees inside improvised plastic gourds. The study – published in the journal Royal Society Open Science – also showed African apes and humans share a genetic mutation that enables them to digest alcohol. It had been once thought only humans engaged in the voluntary and social consumption of alcohol until this discovery. The scientists found evidence of the long-term and recurrent consumption of fermented alcohol from the raffia palm (Raphia hookeri, Arecaceae) by primates from 1995 to 2012. Chimpanzees at Bossou also consumed this alcoholic beverage, often in large quantities, despite an average presence of alcohol of 3.1% alcohol by volume rising to 6.9%. Raffia palms, which occur naturally in seasonally flooded areas are traditionally tapped by locals close to the crown of mature palms, …